Club vs country damages English football

Arsenal used 14 players in the match and there were two more unused substitutes on the bench - but not one of these 16 players was English.

Xenophobia is an English disease - the one tournament that England would win every time, if it existed, would be the 'World Jingoism Games'. Intolerance of 'Johnny Foreigner' is endemic - although political correctness means that the jingoistic epithets are sometimes mumbled sotto voce.

Not by the UK's Prime Minister, though. Gordon Brown's pledge to find 'British jobs for every British worker' was fairly unequivocal in its tone - but it doesn't, of course, apply to football clubs.

Arsenal is the extreme example, as we saw on Sunday, but World Soccer magazine has recently reported that there are an astonishing 338 non-British players in the Premier League, nearly 17 on average per club.

The managers and coaches are mostly from abroad as well - hardly surprising when you look at the rewards. Juande Ramos could virtually name his own price to come and try and rescue Tottenham from the mire - an annual salary of around 6m euros did the trick.

And the clubs themselves are increasingly foreign owned as well - Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, Aston Villa, Fulham, Portsmouth and West Ham are in foreign hands and others will not be far behind.

Good clubs - lousy national team

There was some pretty sparkling football on display at the Emirates and the fact that the end of the match there were only four Englishmen on the pitch (Chelsea's two Coles and Frank Lampard - and the referee) won't have worried the fans too much. Whether the new England coach, the Italian Fabio Capello, will have been so content is another matter.

When he arrives in England shortly to take up his lucrative post he won't find the cupboard bare - but it's not that well stocked either. England's dire failure to qualify for Euro 2008 was at least in part attributable to a lack of available talent.

When Paul Robinson suffered a calamitous loss of confidence and form there was hardly another English goalkeeper of quality to replace him - and David Beckham's call up from Disneyland had 'panic attack selection' written all over it.

The top English football clubs are very big businesses and like any other companies their principal objective is to look after the interests of their shareholders - whether these are stock exchange investors or Russian oiligarchs. And in this commercial world when you are pursuing profits other considerations feature low amongst your concerns.

So the fact that England might want to protect their players from injury before key matches or might want clubs to nurture and develop England qualified talent is treated with contempt by the big clubs.

In many ways Arsenal's past history is that of a quintessentially English football institution but their present day is hardly English at all - only two of their 32 man first team squad are from the UK.

The top tier of English football, the Premier League, is generally acknowledged as being the best in Europe and there are four clubs (Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool) which are amongst the best club sides in the world. But as these clubs have got richer and more successful England's national side has fallen down the world rankings.

Whilst there are some talented English players around there is little strength in depth and, as the statistics show, a minority of players in the League are now English.

This is unique in world football - even Italy, traditionally the most international of leagues, now has predominantly Italian players. And, unlike in England, when these players get together as a national team they are impressive as well as the 2006 World Cup win showed.

Teamwork is the key

There are many examples of teams of players with modest individual talents gelling together successfully as a team - Croatia a recent a case in point. But to do this they have to be moulded into a unit, become familiar with each others roles and skills, and work hard for one another.

That is what happens at the best clubs but it hasn't happened to the England national team for a long time. For all his success as a club coach Sven-Göran Eriksson won nothing in his five years as England's chief coach.

The new manager Capello has an even better track record with top European clubs - but unless he can get more cooperation from the clubs he is unlikely to be more successful than the Swede.

So England's international prospects look very bleak whilst it is quite likely that one of the Premier League's big four will win the Champions League this season. Says it all really.